Disaster, Disaster, Divine: Vegan Chocolate Rum Cake

With newfound confidence, I stepped onto the path towards successfully baking a Vegan cake.  First stop, my old friend Google.  I ran a search for "Vegan Cake" and stumbled upon a plethora of recipes.  Which one should I try out first?

In a few weeks, a good friend had planned a weekend getaway to celebrate her birthday, Passover, and Easter in one big shebang. This gave me a goal and a time-frame.  Rather than exploring a contrived and complicated recipe, I decided to keep it simple: chocolate cake.  Since the Vegan brownies were a success, I figured staying in the realm of chocolate would keep me safe.  So I chose a recipe that seemed fairly basic and easy, gathered the ingredients, followed the directions, and popped it in the oven.  What resulted was a brown gooey mess similar to the red massacre that befell my kitchen the last time I attempted to bake a cake.  What was I doing wrong?  I was starting to feel like baking a Vegan cake was next to impossible.  Cupcakes, sure.  A glorious multilayered thing of beauty, no way.  Baking a cake was quickly becoming the unicorn of my Vegan cooking repertoire.  But I wasn’t about to give up.  I was on a mission and my obsessive tendencies were getting the best of me.

Rather than sifting through more recipes, I thought, what better way to get proof of a successful recipe than to see one created before my own eyes.  Exit Google, enter YouTube and one of its sweetest stars, The Sweetest Vegan.  The video of her orgasmic Devil’s Food Cake recipe piqued my interest, and had me salivating.  Not only did her cake rise beautifully, it also looked oh so rich, tender and moist.  I went to my cupboard, measured the ingredients, mixed it all together per the instructions and popped it in the oven.  My kitchen smelled heavenly and when I peeked through the oven window, I noticed the cake was rising…including the middle.  “Success!” or so I thought.  About ten minutes before the cake should’ve been done baking, I noticed the middle starting to sink.  As the cake cooled, I had a solid 1-inch height around the edges, but the middle had sunk to less than half an inch.  I was able to stack and frost the cake, although it had a huge crater in the center.  Rather than throwing out another cake, I decided to bring this one over to my Mom’s house for a family dinner.  It tasted amazing, but I wasn’t fully content.

Were my cake pans problematic?  Was my oven not calibrated correctly?  Weren't my ingredients fresh?  I quickly turned back to Google in search of answers.  I ditched my cake pans for a nicer set (Thank you, HomeGoods).  I followed advice to bake at a lower temperature to avoid doming (although, I was getting the opposite effect).  I also tested the Baking Powder and Baking Soda, which were purchased only a couple months prior and were still active.

The weekend getaway was less than a week away and I was rapidly running out of time.  One evening, I finished teaching earlier than usual and rather than idly sitting in front of the TV, I went to the kitchen and cut the recipe in half to make one cake layer.  I painstakingly measured out the ingredients (difficult to measure half of 3/4 of a teaspoon), mixed the batter together, and realized the consistency was a lot wetter than in the past.  I goofed!  I halved all of the ingredients except for the water.  I didn’t want to measure the ingredients and make the batter again, so I had to rely on instinct.  I added some flour into the mixture to slightly thicken it, poured it into a pan and baked it.  It’s a lot easier to throw away a solid cake than liquid batter.  I set the kitchen timer, plopped in front of the TV and waited for the batter to solidify.  I knew I was going to toss it into the trash (an act I was familiar with), so I didn’t care to peek at it periodically as I had done with every other attempt.  The timer started beeping, I grabbed the oven mitts, opened the door, and lo and behold I had a cake!  Not only did I have cake, but much to my amazement, it had risen evenly.  I fought the urge to immediately cut right into it and allowed the cake to cool, all the while praying it wouldn't deflate.  Delighted, the cake maintained its height.  But how was it going to taste?  Cue the choir of angels.  After a year of letdowns, a Vegan cake was born.

With a few more tweeks, I had a recipe for Vegan chocolate cake that actually worked.  And just in time for the weekend getaway.  My old habit of adding booze to cake recipes arose and I altered the recipe to a Chocolate Rum Cake.  Although crudely decorated, my friends and I enjoyed the moist boozy cake, and I was satisfied in knowing that baking a Vegan cake is possible.

Vegan Chocolate Rum Cake with Rum Buttercream Filling

(Based on "Britney Spears Femme Fatale Album DEVILS FOOD CAKE" by The Sweetest Vegan)

Dry Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
3/4 cup Cocoa
2 tbs Corn Starch
1 1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Sea Salt

Wet Ingredients:
1/4 cup Soy Milk + 1 tbs Raw Apple Cider Vinegar
3 tsp Ener-G Egg Replacer + 4 tbs Water

12 tbsp Earth Balance Vegan Margarine

1 3/4 cups Sugar
2 cups Water
1/4 cup Unsweetened Apple Sauce

2 tsp Vanilla Extract

Preheat oven to 320ºF.  Add vinegar to 1/4 cup soy milk and reserve.  Stir egg replacer and 4 tbs water, reserve.  Sift together dry ingredients into a medium sized bowl.

Using an electric hand mixer, cream margarine and sugar in a large bowl.  Add egg replacer mixture, water, apple sauce, and vanilla to combine until smooth.  Fold in dry ingredients.  Lastly, fold in soy milk and vinegar mixture.  Pour into two 9-inch cake pans and bake for 27-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.  Allow cakes to cool. 

Rum Syrup

1/4 cup Dark Rum

1/3 cup Water

1/2 cup Sugar

Place all ingredients in a small saucepan and stir over low heat to dissolve sugar.  Allow to cool to room temperature.  When cooled, brush syrup over cooled cake layers with a pastry brush until absorbed.

Rum Buttercream Filling

3 tbs Earth Balance Vegan Margarine

3 tbs Earth Balance Natural Shortening

1 1/2 cups Powdered Sugar

1 tbs Dark Rum

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

Using an electric hand mixer, cream margarine and shortening until light and fluffy.  Add powdered sugar in stages.  Lastly, mix in rum and vanilla.

Decadent Chocolate Rum Frosting

1 12 oz. pkg Extra Firm Silken Tofu, vacuum packed (I use Mori-Nu brand)

3/4 cup Vegan Chocolate Chips, melted in double boiler (I use Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips from Trader Joe's)

2 tbs Dark Rum

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

Blend tofu, melted chocolate, rum and vanilla in a blender until smooth.  Chill in the refrigerator until thickened to desired spreading consistency (around 20-30 minutes).